Now, the mountains.
An early morning sky of a billowing softness, nursery blue, with a powder smudge of pink at the horizon. Cloud obscures the lower slopes but the ridge rises out of it, the sun just beginning to find the peaks. They seem less to reflect it than to glow from within like melted metal. They are lethal, beautiful. The quality of the light. The air smells, tastes different too. I open the little flap of a window as far as it will go and drink it in.
Something has opened in my chest at the sight of the mountains. Difficult to tell in this moment whether it is grief, or joy, or some strange amalgam of the two. My face tightens with cold, and I realise, lifting a hand to it, that my cheeks are wet with tears.
A journey, almost a lifetime ago. Days of travel … different countries, a whole continent’s worth of them. Speeding me away from that place. Fields and villages and great old gilded cities. Then these mountains. Set apart from the rest, looking down at me impassively. Then I understood quite how far I had come. That I was never going back.
I decide to go in search of some breakfast. I dress clumsily – the fastening of each button seems to be accompanied by a purposeful lurch of the train that sends me crashing into the couchette or the washstand – and make my way unsteadily through the sleeping carriage. At intervals half-open doors disclose scenes of unwitting intimacy: stirring forms beneath sheets, sleep-rumpled pyjama-clad bodies. The eye is drawn to these revelations even as one tries not to look. I feel a peculiar tenderness for these strangers, there is familiarity in their unguardedness. All of us, I think, share a certain vulnerability on waking: it is always something of a shock.
I walk the length of the train, through the couchette cars and the second-class carriages in which the passengers doze in strange contortions: I do not envy them their fractured night’s sleep. I discover that there does not appear to be a dining car at all. What a fall from former glory has occurred here, to this train that was once a moving Grand Hotel. With the shutters up throughout the train now the landscape seems to enter the carriage, almost to overwhelm it. It feels more as though we are floating through it than travelling on solid ground. I see businessmen who seem to be making a studied effort not to look out of the windows, as though to be awed by the scenery is really somewhat déclassé. But I see, too, small faces pressed against the glass.
Back in the couchette, galvanised by coffee and a stale bread roll, I open my suitcase. I lift it out, and lay it upon the bed. It is perhaps two metres in length, but the fabric is so fine that it takes up less room than a paperback when folded. As it unfurls the sunlight catches on gold thread. The hues are ecstatically vivid, despite the age of the piece. It is hand-sewn. The stitching, though neat and tiny, bears the unmistakable evidence of human imperfection. I trace it with a finger. I feel the peculiar intimacy of it, my hand so near to the place where, decades ago, another hand worked its talent into the cloth. Fingers tight about the needle, gripping, piercing.
Over the years it has travelled with me everywhere, improving every space in which it has been placed. Illicitly loud against regulation linen. Glowing with an almost preternatural brightness from a wall in London, the colours filling the room like light passed through stained glass, bleeding into the grey day outside. And now, the uninspiring Formica and chipboard interior of a train berth: ridiculous splendour, the whole space seeming to shrink and gather about it.
Threads have come loose and small stains have appeared over time but it has never been washed or mended. I could not bear it. I could not stand the idea that some essence might be removed in the cleaning of it: the spirit of a place, of the person who made it. I could not bear the thought that the sanctity of its creation would be compromised by the work of a stranger.
It is something tangible. Made by her. Almost a part of her. It is like the relic of magic left in the hands of the narrator at the end of a fairy tale. It means that I did not imagine any of it. It makes her real.
The Boy
For some time he has carried around in him a kernel of pain, like a hot stone. Normally it sits in his chest, somewhere between his lungs. In the day he can manage it. When his mind is busy, at school. When he is cooking, particularly. But at times, when he is trying to sleep, and finds himself alone in the dark with his thoughts and no distractions, it seems to grow. At these times it feels that it is taking control of him, that it is almost bigger than him. He wonders how it is that his body remembers to breathe or swallow, or any of the other things that keep him alive. Because his head is full with it, his thoughts are blotted out by it. It is no real cause for alarm, then, when the pain grows. It is in his head now, and his stomach, and his limbs ache with it. All of this is new. But still he does not call out to Nur hanım, or to either of the older ladies. Instead he shuts his eyes.
Incredible heat. From everywhere the sound of screaming and
